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Month: March 2012

I took a break from blogging for the last few months because I needed to sharpen my programming skills. If I’m going to make a video game, I’ll need them. But I’ve run into a very interesting problem which spills out from isolated programming into other realms. I have two choices at this point. I can quietly find a way around the problem and keep programming without making a larger statement about life in general, or I can utilize parts of the philosophy I’ve gained outside of programming to address this problem within the programming world.

What’s remarkable is that if I successfully address the programming issue with philosophy, it could actually cause a little stir in the programming world, and if it does, it would work toward establishing my reputation as a philospher among those who read my work. And the thing is, after 15 years of wandering in the world since my mystic vision at the age of 20, I think I’m ready for the spotlight.

So you can imagine how tense this situation is. Fortunately, I have reliable – at least I think they’re reliable – sources which say that the end of the world will be postponed until *after* I calm myself.

I wrote the above words a week ago, and the Trickster God hasn’t permitted me to understand or to complete my blog post until now.

I suppose that attempting to “tie it all together” was overreaching.

But I do want to keep my readers informed.

Isn’t funny how quickly one can forget what one had in mind?

The essence of what I’m trying to say is that I have entered into the world of computer programming. I have taken the moniker “Zach the Mystic”. I must straddle these two worlds, Jungian mysticism and computer programming.

How do you straddle Jungian mysticism and computer programming? Well, anyway, here’s the link to the little bit of programming I’ve done so far:

The next thing I’m going to work on is a port of a very special kind of program editor. But as the Rosicrucians say, “Mysteries profaned and made public fade and lose their grace. Therefore cast not pearls before swine or make a bed of roses for an ass.”

Today I give you nothing. I had begun another installment in my “Tying it all together” series, but WordPress conveniently erased it, which is not bad luck, but a sign. Perhaps God wants me to write it tomorrow instead of today. Who am I to argue with God?

The contents I intend to reveal in this series are actually quite intense, so maybe it’s good that I have another day to think about it.

I always feel a strange need to be more than I am when I blog here. I guess I’m aware both of the power of words and of the power of the internet, although it’s taken me much longer to understand the power of the internet than that of words. Because of this, I am trying to be as exposed as possible about who I am and what I feel. By exposing myself to the bright light I hope to have the dampness of my personality dried out, so to say.

The particular occasion for admitting this to you is that I am listening to this song (click here) on continual repeat as I write this post. It’s the kind of thing that I think most people would refrain from telling their readers, not because it’s not a totally awesome song – which it is – but because it would remind anyone who was alive when that song appeared of that era. My impulse as a blogger is to appear fresh, new, different. To say I’m listening exclusively to an old eighties song, well, what’s fresh about that? But I’m pretty sure telling you is the right thing to do.

I don’t need to appear fresh, new, different. It’s like a mantra I need to repeat to myself. For the past few months I’ve been starting to program my computer with the eventual goal of making a video game. But because I am following a more-or-less religious impulse in doing so, I knew I couldn’t just take the quickest and easiest path.

I suppose I need to elaborate a bit on what I mean. When I was about 24 years old, I got the original vision for a video game. It was accompanied by three things. One was an image of a dragon found in the depths of a dungeon. Such a dragon appears briefly at approximately 1 minute and 43 seconds into the following video:

Note also the music playing as the adventurers travel through the red-orange dungeon where the green dragon is found. It gets interrupted many times by the battle sequence, so it’s difficult to hear as a piece of music in itself here. Now the second thing which accompanied my vision of the video game was an altered version of this dungeon-walking music, an extension of the music with a triumphant sound which lasts only about 12 seconds if you you play it at normal speed. Not a lot of music, in other words. I’ve run through this melody so many times on the piano since then that it has taken on a mystical significance for me.

The third thing which accompanied my vision was the knowledge that the theme of my video game would be the same theme as that of the Terminator movies – War With The Machines. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convey the power of this theme easily to someone who hasn’t seen either of the movies The Terminator or Terminator 2: Judgment Day, so go see one or both of them and you’ll understand.

A Dragon, the fragment of a Tune, and a Theme: the War with the Machines.

And that’s what I’ve had to go on as I make my way into the art and craft of videogame creation. I can explain a little more about how I came to know that this was my destiny in a later blog post. For now, understand that because of the third thing, the War with the Machines, it was going to be impossible for me to create a videogame without first really coming to understand how the computer works.

So I studied computer programming for years without actually programming anything. I have approached it like a religious and mystical quest, and I know that the way I get to the finish line will not be how others would do it.

The first question which must be asked is how is one to program the computer? In computer terms this is called one’s “environment”, and there is no consensus as to which one to use. No computer may be programmed without the help of other programs. This is because all the computer’s data is stored in sealed chambers invisible to the naked eye, and moreover, if you were to expose the circuits in order to inspect them, they would be destroyed very quickly by dust particles which would settle onto them, rendering them useless. Thus, computer programming is the most abstract of any engineering task. You are utterly reliant on already existing computer programs to turn invisible data into something you can recognize, so that you can work with it.

Unfortunately I have lost my train of thought again. I will pick this up again tomorrow!